Erik Stolterman

Humans did not discover fire--they designed it. Design is not defined by software programs, blueprints, or font choice. When we create new things--technologies, organizations, processes, systems, environments, ways of thinking--we engage in design. With this expansive view of design as their premise, in The Design Way, Harold Nelson and Erik Stolterman make the case for design as its own culture of inquiry and action. They offer not a recipe for design practice or theorizing but a formulation of design culture's fundamental core of ideas. These ideas--which form" the design way"--are applicable to an infinite variety of design domains, from such traditional fields as architecture and graphic design to such nontraditional design areas as organizational, educational, interaction, and health care design. Nelson and Stolterman present design culture in terms of foundations (first principles), fundamentals (core concepts …

The authors of Thoughtful Interaction Design go beyond the usual technical concerns of usability and usefulness to consider interaction design from a design perspective. The shaping of digital artifacts is a design process that influences the form and functions of workplaces, schools, communication, and culture; the successful interaction designer must use both ethical and aesthetic judgment to create designs that are appropriate to a given environment. This book is not a how-to manual, but a collection of tools for thought about interaction design. Working with information technology—called by the authors" the material without qualities"—interaction designers create not a static object but a dynamic pattern of interactivity. The design vision is closely linked to context and not simply focused on the technology. The authors' action-oriented and context-dependent design theory, drawing on design theorist Donald Schon's concept of the reflective practitioner, helps designers deal with complex design challenges created by new technology and new knowledge. Their approach, based on a foundation of thoughtfulness that acknowledges the designer's responsibility not only for the functional qualities of the design product but for the ethical and aesthetic qualities as well, fills the need for a theory of interaction design that can increase and nurture design knowledge. From this perspective they address the fundamental question of what kind of knowledge an aspiring designer needs, discussing the process of design, the designer, design methods and techniques, the design product and its qualities, and conditions for interaction design.

The role of prototypes is well established in the field of HCI and Design. A lack of knowledge, however, about the fundamental nature of prototypes still exists. Researchers have attempted to identify different types of prototypes, such as low-vs. high-fidelity prototypes, but these attempts have centered on evaluation rather than support of design exploration. There have also been efforts to provide new ways of thinking about the activity of using prototypes, such as experience prototyping and paper prototyping, but these efforts do not provide a discourse for understanding fundamental characteristics of prototypes. In this article, we propose an anatomy of prototypes as a framework for prototype conceptualization. We view prototypes not only in their role in evaluation but also in their generative role in enabling designers to reflect on their design activities in exploring a design space. We base this framework on the …

The focus of this paper is interaction design research aimed at supporting interaction design practice. The main argument is that this kind of interaction design research has not (always) been successful, and that the reason for this is that it has not been guided by a sufficient understanding of the nature of design practice. Based on a comparison between the notion of complexity in science and in design, it is argued that science is not the best place to look for approaches and methods on how to approach design complexity. Instead, the case is made that any attempt by interaction design research to produce outcomes aimed at supporting design practice must be grounded in a fundamental understanding of the nature of design practice. Such an understanding can be developed into a well-grounded and rich set of rigorous and disciplined design methods and techniques, appropriate to the needs and desires of practicing designers.

The field of HCI is experiencing a growing interest in Research through Design (RtD), a research approach that employs methods and processes from design practice as a legitimate method of inquiry. We are interested in expanding and formalizing this research approach, and understanding how knowledge, or theory, is generated from this type of design research. We conducted interviews with 12 leading HCI design researchers, asking them about design research, design theory, and RtD specifically. They were easily able to identify different types of design research and design theory from contemporary and historical design research efforts, and believed that RtD might be one of the most important contributions of design researchers to the larger research community. We further examined three historical RtD projects that were repeatedly mentioned in the interviews, and performed a critique of current RtD …

This paper takes up the problem of understanding why we preserve some things passionately and discard others without thought. We briefly report on the theoretical literature relating to this question, both in terms of existing literature in HCI, as well as in terms of related literatures that can advance the understanding for the HCI community. We use this reading to refine our frameworks for understanding durability in digital artifice as an issue of sustainable interaction design in HCI. Next, we report in detail on our ongoing work in collecting personal inventories of digital artifice in the home context. We relate our prior and most current personal inventories collections to the framework that owes to our reading of the theoretical literature. Finally, we summarize the theoretical implications and findings of our personal inventories work in terms of implications for the design of digital artifice in a manner that is more durable.

People, as well as things, appear to have character--high-level attributes that help us understand and relate to them. A character is a coherent set of characteristics and attributes that apply to appearance and behaviour alike, cutting across different functions, situations and value systems--esthetical, technical, ethical--providing support for anticipation, interpretation and interaction. Consistency in character may become more important than ever in the increasingly complex artifacts of our computer-supported future.© 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Although there has been a drastic increase in the research of aesthetics of interaction, we still lack well-defined practical knowledge of how to design aesthetic interactions. In order to develop such knowledge, we adapt three important ways of thinking in designing interactions influenced by traditional design disciplines, namely, 1) understanding what it is that is designed---ie interaction, 2) knowing what is possible to be manipulated when designing interactions---ie attributes of interaction, and 3) mastering how to manipulate the attributes to shape the interactions. We explain our approach by arguing from the somaesthetic perspective. We propose the concept of interaction gestalt, as a way to achieve those three ways of thinking in design. We then propose a set of interaction gestalt attributes that can be used in designing aesthetic interactions. We end with a discussion of the implications and benefits of this …

Persona is a technique being used by practicing designers in interaction design. Existing research presents the ways personas should/could be used, or report new efforts of making good use of the persona concept. Comparing to the primary idea of persona, this paper explores some manners with which practitioners actually utilize persona in their work, which has not been emphasized in-depth in current literatures. Our findings provide an initial step showing how practitioners in a creative way develop various usages of personas in practice. We believe this research not only expands the understanding of personas in design, but also gives insights about how practicing designers adapt and make design" tools" their own.

In this article, we explore a concept-driven approach to interaction design research with a specific focus on theoretical advancements. We introduce this approach as a complementary approach to more traditional, and well-known, user-centered interaction design approaches. A concept-driven approach aims at manifesting theoretical concepts in concrete designs. A good concept design is both conceptually and historically grounded, bearing signs of the intended theoretical considerations. In the area of human–computer interaction and interaction design research, this approach has been quite popular but not necessarily explicitly recognized and developed as a proper research methodology. In this article, we demonstrate how a concept-driven approach can coexist, and be integrated with, common user-centered approaches to interaction design through the development of a model that makes explicit the existing …

Today system design methods seem to presuppose the system design process as problem solving; 7 ie as repair of a malfunctioning reality. Another as—sumption underlying these methods is the irrationality of system designers practice. This paper challenges this, often naive, view of rationality un—derlying system design methods by searching for the hidden rationality of practice, Twenty system designers were interviewed about their View on design skill, design methods, quality and the ‘nature’of system design. The answers of the designers in many cases contradicts basic assumptions underlying many of today’s design methods, especially assumptions about the nature and rationality of the design process. One conclusion of the study is that a general understanding of the exist—ing design practice is of crucial importance to all method development, at least if the purpose is to create methods that will be …

The results of an interview study with twenty system designers are presented. The study shows that if we want to understand the hidden rationale of design practice, it is both meaning ful and useful to view the system design practice as ideal-oriented design. The results of the interviews are formulated as a question: How would and could the methodology and practice of syste m design change if it were based on an ideal-oriented design theory? Some areas where further work and development ought to be done are presented.

Assuming that an interactive artifact cannot be fully understood by itself due to their increasing number, we explored how individual artifacts are related to each other and how those relationships can be investigated for further design and research implications. This study suggests a concept of ecology of artifacts to describe any implicit or explicit relationships among interactive artifacts in one's personal life. We conducted two types of studies--personal inventory study and an ecology map study--to explore multiple dimensions for understanding a personal ecology of artifacts. We expect the knowledge of artifact ecology would help designers and researchers in the field of HCI to create and analyze interactive artifacts considering their dynamic interplays in an increasingly ubiquitous technology environment.